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Thursday, April 18, 2013

Given the sad passing of our friend and colleague David Churchill, we've decided to honour him in a manner totally fitting to our memory of him. Since he was such a strong advocate of Critics at Large from the beginning, he was quick to initiate ideas. One thing he was quite fond of were omnibus projects like the Remembering 9/11 collection (which led to our first e-book) and the Titanic 100th Anniversary commemoration. Therefore, we felt strongly that we could best salute our late columnist by creating an Omnibus of David. From April 16 until April 24, we plan to publish – daily – the best of David Churchill as chosen by our writers.

I just re-read David Churchill’s zinger of a piece detailing his enduring affection and indebtedness to the late great American film critic Pauline Kael, and admit I several times worried I wouldn’t get through it.

Not because it isn’t cogent: David, whom I met at university, should have been on the inter-college debating team because he has always known how to build and lob a fire bomb of an argument. I was reading him and hanging on every word, convinced that other critics who denounce Kael are doing it for their own self-aggrandizement and are missing the point, as David says, of her commitment to speak the truth. David never did mince words.

And it wasn’t because it isn’t expertly written: David writes the way he talks, with a rat-a-tat clarity and intensity of focus that is by turns profound and funny, with lots of the personal invested in what he is saying. We met in Professor Cameron Tolton’s history of cinema class and both of us were undergraduates also keenly interested in writing criticism. David went to The Newspaper to write on film; I ended up at The Varsity where I wrote on dance and, well, I am getting way from myself again. It’s the reason I had difficulty reading the piece all the way through:

I am bereft.

While reading his heartfelt tribute to a critic who inspired him to become a critic in the first place – he pronounces it strongly here – I kept hearing his voice, and seeing the flash of his eyes as he grew passionate in defence of no holds barred arts criticism. What really mattered to him.

His references to his past at the University of Toronto, where I met him all those years ago, not able not to notice him for the way he used to bound up in class, hurling facts at our only somewhat bemused professor to show off his encyclopaedic grasp of pop culture when he was just 19 and fresh out of Bracebridge (“Bracebridge?” I remember exclaiming, dumbfounded at the thought. “But there’s but one movie theatre in that town. How do you know so much?” He never did tell me.) – they made me so deeply sad again for his recent and sudden parting. I could barely see the words from behind my veil of tears.

Davis had always been so forceful, and I truly had believed him when he told me he was going to defeat the cancer that took him – really, the only thing ever capable of stopping his voice. And so my lingering shock at his departure.

He was electric as an eel: brilliant, and just as quick. I already acutely feel the loss of his energy. Since learning the news of his passing I have felt plunged in darkness. I mourn my friend, and the passing of time, of course. I long again for those galvanizing days back on campus, shot through with lightening bolts of discovery, when we both were bursting with ideas and enthusiasm and nothing, simply nothing, would ever stand in our way.

I am reminded of that fervour we once shared when I read David say in his one-two-punch homage to Pauline Kael, quoting New York Times critic A. O. Scott, “She will not lead you to correct positions, but she is an example of the right way to do criticism, which is with everything you have.”

David then goes on to explain how that example made him the critic he in turn became: opinionated, impassioned, memorable.

“Write from the heart. That is what I learned from Kael from reading her and [from] that conversation I had 30+ years ago,” he says.

“I have never tried to imitate her style (who could?), but I have tried to make the personal public as she often did. Bring your guts, your life, and your point-of view into everything you write.”

It's astonishing and quite craven how often people have to wait until
somebody's dead, sometimes long dead, before they dare to start taking a
strip off them. Since her passing in 2001, The New Yorker magazine film critic extraordinaire Pauline Kael
has been flayed by former 'acolytes,' enemies and competitors. Just
when you think the noise is dying down and people can just read her
brilliant criticism for what's on the page, not the way she may have
'treated' someone, another rift erupts. For a woman who stopped writing
criticism in 1991 and died of Parkinson's disease in 2001, she sure
still stirs up a shit storm of emotion amongst current critics.

In the very early 1980s, I met Kael at a book signing in Toronto at a
now defunct store called Cine Books. She was in town to promote and sign
her then-latest collection of essays compiled from The New Yorker.
I arrived a bit late and found that there were only a handful of people
left. As circumstances played out, the small crowd thinned and I found
myself essentially alone with Kael. I don't know how long we talked (my
memory says an hour, but I don't think so), but I remember, if not the
details of it, at least sensing her seeming enthusiasm as she listened
to me talk about my own desire to be a film critic (I was writing for a
now-defunct student newspaper at the University of Toronto called,
unimaginatively, The Newspaper). Never once during our chat, even
when other people came up and then left, did I feel I was wasting her
time. She restarted the conversation and on we talked. It was the sort
of thing I needed as a young writer to hear words of encouragement from a
critic I admired. Don't get me wrong. I was never a “Paulette,” as her
supposed band of young writers who became part of her literal or
figurative circle were derisively called. I had my own mind. For all the
reviews she wrote that I admired, such as her stunning piece on Brian
de Palma's misunderstood masterpiece, Casualties of War (1989), I found others with which I did not agree, such as her lukewarm review of Philip Kaufman's fine The Right Stuff (1983). (It was her review though of Kaufman's 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers that made me want to be a critic in the first place.)

As much as she was admired, she was despised. Groundless accusations of
her being homophobic, or even anti-Semitic, were often thrown at her
based on a misreading of her work, or by wilfully ignoring sentences
that came after the bits her critics isolated as “proof.” How she was
anti-Semitic is beyond me since she was Jewish, but it stemmed mostly
from her denunciation of Claude Lanzmann's overrated, languid and
stupefying Holocaust documentary, Shoah (1985). There's a school
of thought that believes that there's no such thing as a bad Holocaust
film because the subject is so important. Ridiculous. Give me Renais'
harrowing and horrifying Night and Fog (1955), Max Ophuls' The Sorrow and the Pity (1969) or Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993) over Lanzmann's self-important work any day.

And now it all begins again. Tomorrow, a book called The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael (Library of America) will be published followed four days later by an unauthorized biography, Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark
(Viking) by Brian Kellow. Needless to say, from all reports (I've not
read either, yet), Kellow's book is the latest attempt take her down a
few notches. As New York Times critic Manohla Dargis says
disdainfully about her, ”Given how badly she comes across in the
biography – palling around with filmmakers she reviewed is merely the
beginning – she doesn't set a good example [as a critic giving
everything she had to what she had to say].” Manohla is yet another
contemporary critic who feels the need to destroy the “mighty” Kael.
Why? So that her own opinion can shine?. More from Manohla: “If she
still casts a shadow it's less because of her ideas, pugilistic writing
style, ethical lapses and cruelties (and not merely in her reviews) ...”
Sorry, Manohla, but I've been reading you off and on for years and I
cannot remember a thing you've written about movies. Kael? I still
remember the great and the infuriating, because she, as A.O. Scott (the
other New York Times critic) said in the same article,
“She will not lead you to correct positions, but she is an example of
the right way to do criticism, which is with everything you have.”

Kael, in later years

Ironically, critics who continue to attack Kael for being a bully end up
using bullying tactics themselves. It was two years after her death
before one of her eventual replacements at The New Yorker, David
Denby, felt safe to take his own shots at her in that very magazine. He
claimed to be a Paulette himself in the late 1960s, and then he
supposedly fell out of favour with her in the late 1970s because he,
first, didn't sycophantically agree with her all the time (which he
claimed she required); and secondly, when she supposedly accused him of
copying her style. Maybe he should have agreed with her more often
because he might have ended up being half the critic she was. Denby is
another critic whose work I sometimes read only to have little memory of
it afterwards. I doubt very much she wanted to be surrounded by ass
kissers. I often felt in reading her writing that if you gave back a
good, reasoned, solid, personal and truthful argument, she may not have
agreed with you, but she would have respected your opinion. It's just
that she didn't suffer fools gladly. If she disagreed with your point of
view, as she did with Andrew Sarris' slavish devotion to the auteur
theory where even a 'great' director's bad work was worthy of
consideration, then she did it with all her might (much to Sarris'
anger). I agree with Kael here, too, because there were directors whose
work I greatly admired, such as Howard Hawks (one included in Sarris'
pantheon), but I wasn't blind to the fact that his bum films could be
just as bad as, oh I don't know, a Michael Winner movie (Death Wish). Ever heard of A Song Is Born (1948)? Neither have I, but it's a musical remake of Hawks' great Ball of Fire (1941); ever tried sitting through Land of the Pharaohs (1955)? Good luck with that.

Even the local media has been getting in on the bashing Kael act. The Toronto Star's
Peter Howell takes Kael to task for a comment she made in 1980 about
the state of films. She wrote: “[T]he movies have been so rank the last
couple of years that when I see people lining up to buy tickets I
sometimes think that the movies aren't drawing an audience – they're
inheriting an audience.” He then goes on to say how wrong she is and
then lists the 'good' films that came out in the two years before she
was growing weary. He's right. There were good films, such as Manhattan and The Last Waltz, but then he also includes Days of Heaven (the pretty locust movie as I call it), The Deer Hunter (anybody tried watching it lately?) and The Shining (which Critics At Large's Kevin Courrier recently called “Kubrick's folly”.
I don't agree with Kevin's assessment and will address it at length
once winter comes, but Kevin's sure not alone in that opinion). Then
Howell tries to say how many “great” movies there have been this year,
such as, The Tree of Life and Take Shelter, both of which have received mixed reviews at best.

It's as if these critics need to take the mickey out of Kael in order to
justify their own existence as critics. No you don't. Just do what she
always did. Write from the heart. That is what I learned from Kael from
reading her and in that conversation I had 30+ years ago. I have never
tried to imitate her style (who could?), but I have tried to make the
personal public as she often did. Bring your guts, your life, and your
point-of view into everything you write. Don't just try to appeal to the
masses as when a well-known critic put Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
(2001) on his Top Ten not because he liked it, but because he just
didn't want to be bothered with the angry mail. That is just plain old
cowardice. If you cannot say what you really thought of the film, then
quit. Me, I loved the Jackson films (and I'm no fan of the Tolkien
books) as I have said here.
My opinion is always my own (another thing Kael 'taught' me), not some
vain attempt to try to satisfy my peers, or some special interest group
who might write you a nasty note when you diss a film they love.

Kael is still causing controversy and stirring up the shit because of
what she wrote and the passion in which she did it. She still stirs up
the shit because so few critics have ever managed to measure up to the
quality of her work and few ever will. That's why she still delights and
angers so many.

– originally published on October 26, 2011.

– David Churchill is a critic and author of the novel The Empire of Death. You can read an excerpt here. Or go to http://www.wordplaysalon.com for more information.